Closed loop controls have been disrupting one industry after another as they become replacements for expensive precision parts or wide windows of latitude product/process design. Generally, they have been expanding their scale from individual subsystems to IOTs to complete production-printing systems. The use of closed loop control technology instead of precision parts or robust open loop system modeling and design captures the Moore's law cost curves of the electronics industry for electromechanical products. Applying distributed controls outside the Input Output Terminals (IOT) for predictable color, rendering all suitably equipped color IOTs “identically” and being able to render printed color over display devices accurately opens color cluster printing as an option to large in line color printers (e.g., xerographic and offset) and distributed printing as a viable alternative to the print and distribute business model of high quality graphic arts.
One of the largest barriers to cluster color printing's applicability is the inconsistency in color output. The gray balance technology (U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/566291, entitled: “On-line calibration system for a dynamically varying color marking device”) may still not be enough to achieve consistency in a distributed and clustered print environment.
The present invention is directed towards the elimination of such barriers by controlling the printers to have substantially identical output color responses for substantially identical input CMYK values.